Comedian Paula Poundstone balances life on the road with motherhood

Welcome to Paula Poundstone's world. It's like your world, but with tweaks.

Poundstone, a single parent of three, chaperoned her 17-year-old daughter's spring band trip. And she spent much of the summer in a battle over the computer with her 13-year-old son.

See, pretty much just like you. The chief difference might be that Poundstone, 52, spends her weekends performing stand-up comedy on stages from California to New York, including a stop Friday at the Pabst Theater.

Her life is different, too, in that she's a regular on National Public Radio's "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!" The comedy/game show requires her to fly vast distances to locations, usually Chicago.

"I imagine it's the same balance that any other working parent has to try to strike," Poundstone said by phone from her California home. The difference is, "when I'm home, I'm really, really home. I'm teaching fractions to my oldest daughter. And when I'm not here, I'm really not here."

Her road trips are scheduled around her 13-year-old son and two daughters, ages 17 and 20. She'll come into a city late in the afternoon before a show and leave before the sun comes up the next day.

"I get the first flight out from anywhere I am because I have to come home to my kids," she said.

Don't bore the waitress

Poundstone's career started in the 1980s in a landmark San Francisco comedy club called The Other Café - a comedy club that spawned, among others, Robin Williams. On the nights she wasn't on stage, she worked behind the counter, where she would hear the waitresses complain about the comics who performed the same material night after night.

"It made me really self-conscious, and I made sure every time I went on I wasn't boring a waitress," said Poundstone, whose humor and timing are dry and self-effacing. "I'm really more prolific than most stand-ups. My act changes. I do fold in new experiences, new observations, whatever you want to call it."

Fast forward a few decades and Poundstone has found another technique to help craft her observational jokes 140 characters at a time. She's @paulapoundstone on Twitter.

"When I first got turned on to Twitter, I knew it was a match right away," she said. "At the same time, I thought it was the stupidest, most narcissistic thing I ever heard of. I still think that, and I enjoy it."

She tweets about events she attends and some she doesn't. Her running Twitter dialogue on the last "Oprah" show showed off the skills of a fine-tuned professional, because Poundstone admits she's probably only seen a few minutes of the iconic show in its 25 years.

When she's away and working, Poundstone is so focused that when she gets onstage, she said, she feels like she's "returning to a friend after having some experiences that make me want to really relate them. That I have a funny story to tell."

For a long while, that story included Pop Tarts - so much so that Poundstone's face was included in a Chicago Tribune timeline about the breakfast food. The jokes aren't part of the act anymore - although people still occasionally bring Pop Tarts to her shows - but they're not totally out of the picture.

"I, by the way, had two in bed before I fell asleep last night," Poundstone said. "I think they've changed them."

Career rehab

Seven years ago she got the call to join "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!" She had never heard of the quirky show where celebrities and experts are interviewed and a panel - including Poundstone - answers questions about the news for points.

The offer came as Poundstone was rebuilding her career after "the incident." She was arrested in June 2001 and charged with driving while intoxicated. She had her children in the car at the time. Poundstone was ordered to rehab for 180 days. She regained parental rights to her three adopted children, but her two foster children were permanently taken away.

She opened up about it on "Larry King Live" in 2002 and talked about it in her act for a while but, she said, "as the years go by, not so much."

Instead, the incident keeps her mindful that the daily challenges from Thomas, the 13-year-old, are memories that should be cherished. And, maybe, used in the act.

"He's forbidden to use computer anymore. He can't even look at one," she said. "He was at a friend's, and I walk over after him. I hear the neighbor boy say, 'I'm going to turn it off now.' Thomas comes to the door and looks like he's opening the door to a speakeasy."

Busted, Thomas tried to tell Poundstone that his friend was just doing homework - something you probably shouldn't attempt when your mother is quick on her feet.